Yes, you are reading correctly, it is possible to install a web browser onto a text-based operating system, albeit a limited one. You won’t get all the fancy features of Firefox; but it is a very quick, small, and efficient browser called Lynx. Like many other things, installation is simple, just one command required:

sudo apt-get install lynx

This will then automatically download and install the software, to run it at the terminal simply type the following command:

lynx

Which will bring up a home page similar to the following:

To navigate to a page press “g” (without quotes) and then enter the url of the site which you want to visit, for example ubuntuserver.info. It will then bring up a text-only version of the website, which, on most sites, will look much different to what you are used to.

You can also open lynx directly at a url using the following command:

lynx ubuntuserver.info

Which will open up ubuntuserver.info, just replace the URL with whatever page you want to see.

Please remember that this is a very basic browser, and definately isn’t best suited to displaying graphics-heavy websites, although separates well coded websites (those that will work in a text only browser) with badly coded websites (those that won’t)